h suffering alone men and nations find their
greater selves. It is fifty years since we Americans knew the
Pentecost of Calamity. These years have been too easy. We have not had
to live dangerously enough. We have prospered, we have been immune,
and our prosperity has proved somewhat a curse in disguise.

In these times that uncover men's souls and the souls of nations, has
our soul come to light, or only our huge, lavish body? In 1865 we had
found our soul indeed. Where is it gone? We have been witnessing many
"scholarly retreats," and every day we have had to hear the "maxims of
a low prudence." Have they sunk to the core and killed it? God forbid!
But since August, 1914, we have stood listening to the cry of our
European brothers-in-Liberty. They did not ask our feeble arm to
strike in their cause, but they yearned for our voice and did not get
it. Will History acquit us of this silence?

Meanwhile, the maxims of a low prudence, masquerading as Christianity,
daily counsel us to keep our arm feeble. It was not so that Washington
survived Valley Forge, or Lincoln won through to Appomattox. If the
Fourth of July and the Declaration it celebrates still mean anything
to us, let our arm be strong.

This for our own sake. For the sake of mankind, if this war brings
home to us that we now sit in the council of nations and share
directly in the general responsibility for the world's well-being, we
shall have taken a great stride in national and spiritual maturity,
and our talk about the brotherhood of man may progress from rhetoric
towards realization.

XV

We have yet to find our greater selves. We have also yet to realize
that Europe, since the Spanish War, has counted us in the concert of
great nations far more than we have counted ourselves.

Somebody wrote in the New York Sun:

_We are not English, German, Swede,
Or Austrian, Russian, French or Pole;
But we have made a separate breed
And gained a separate soul._

It sounds well; it means nothing; its sum total is zero. America
asserts the brotherhood of man and then talks about a separate soul!

To speak of the Old World and the New World is to speak in a dead
language. The world is one. All humanity is in the same boat. The
passengers multiply, but the boat remains the same size. And people
who rock the boat must be stopped by force. America can no more
separate itself from the destiny of Europe than it can escape the
natural law